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« Last post by Emma on January 25, 2019, 07:42:21 PM »
This might be a bit controversial, but... whatever. First background. I was an administrator (under my old name -- if you know who this is referring to you can add two and two together for why it changed and I'm sure you understand then why I have not spoken up yet) at Zelda Wiki prior to the formation of NIWA. I was the originator of the idea of forming a wiki alliance. I was told my idea was the stupidest thing ever and (combined with some other unwarranted issues) I was removed as an admin within a few weeks of making this proposal. Most of the staff was against my removal, however the few who wanted it falsely put the support of others behind it and I was thrown out. I find out a few months later that all three of the individuals who told me my wiki alliance idea was stupid were working with Bulbapedia and Mario Wiki to make an actual wiki alliance. Before I came along, the wiki was dead, it had one active staff member who was severely overworked and didn't know how to code. A lot of what the wiki has now, was my doing. Much of its templates and on-wiki coding was my work. I got zero recognition for it. And everything I did was taken and used anyway. It was my idea to have a large staff that can maintain it. Before me they thought "oh, just one or two people is enough" and it barely managed to survive.
Not everyone agreed with the direction the wiki was going. The owner, Jason, consistently mismanaged the wiki. He repeatedly claimed he couldn't afford the hosting bills while he at the same time bragged to his friends on Facebook how rich the sites he owned were making him. He constantly tried to meddle with things he didn't understand and kept forcing bad changes onto the wiki. He kept giving power to make decisions on the wiki to webmasters of other websites who had no wiki experience that also did not have any understanding of how to manage a staff (ironic right?). These people he gave power to constantly meddled for their own selfish reasons and consistently set the wiki back and held back projects they were working on. He clashed with some other people there and some of them decided that they should try to buy the wiki from Jason to take it from his irresponsible hands, or create a new one if he refused to sell. This is how Zelda Dungeon Wiki came to be. Myself and Mases, the leaders of the movement to get the wiki away from Jason, decided that our attempts to buy it from him were a failure and we made our own. I worked extremely hard to get that wiki functioning and it paid off. I know think it's the best Zelda-oriented wiki out there. And it's proud of its independence.
Jason sold Zelda Wiki to Curse without the knowledge or consent of any of its staff or users at the time. He used the sale of Zelda Wiki to actually help him get employed by Curse. Curse is absolutely never going to let Zelda Wiki go, ever. Especially now after Fandom/Wikia acquired it. Wikia has been trying to acquire Zelda Wiki for years. It was its constant purchase proposals they sent Jason that motivated me to suggest the alliance in the first place. It's going to hold onto it and refuse any offers to buy it from them. If you're holding out any hopes of Zelda Wiki regaining its independence, it's never going to happen. It never was independent. It was always the tool of someone who only cared about the money that didn't care about the content or the community. Do not believe the people tho say that there isn't any outside pressure from Gamepedia. There absolutely is. Advertising concerns obviously. But also content restrictions, Things with layouts being forced upon them. And with Fandom/Wikia being in control now that will, over the next couple years, get worse. It's only a matter of time before someone at Wikia notices the navigation boxes for NIWA and does their research and finds out it's an alliance against Wikia and forces Zelda Wiki to remove it. And they will remove it without protest or notification to anyone here at NIWA. They're corporate now.
I worked at a Wikia wiki for months before I gave up. They meddled constantly. One thing they did all the time was removed features I was using that were critical to the jobs I was performing. I had to ask three times for it to be reenabled but they just kept disabling it. I was given essentially no freedom to make the layout suit the content, or be what I thought was appropriate. As the only staff member at the time, it should have been my decision. But it wasn't. They wanted their horrible layout. They wanted functional wiki pages like recentchanges to be hard to access. They wouldn't let me make shortcuts or change toolbars to be more useful for editors. I couldn't take it anymore and I gave up. Remember that it was these bad layouts that convinced so many wikis to abandon Wikia and what actually spawned Gamepedia in the first place. And now Wikia owns Curse, as well as a few wikis, like The Vault, who abandoned them in the first place because of their meddling. This is who owns Zelda Wiki now. You're fooling yourself if you think there won't be meddling.
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